Streaming Media West Roundup: Internap, Ankeena, HD Cloud

Online video platform providers, CDNs and other media infrastructure companies have gathered in San Jose., Calif., this week for the Streaming Media West conference. Here are some highlights from vendors releasing news on Day One of the show:

Internap Updates Its CDN Offering

After a lengthy silence, Internap is announcing new features to its content delivery network that it believes will help make it competitive again. The features are primarily focused around improved ease of use for its enterprise customers, including new “set and forget” capabilities such as single-upload transcoding and continuous bitrate adjustment. The CDN has also been tweaked to leverage Internap’s Managed Internet Route Optimizer technology, which it claims delivers better performance by making sure that content is delivered from the right point of presence. Finally, the company updated its reporting features to provide more granular analytics.

While Internap has struggled to compete in the CDN market ever since it acquired the assets of Vitalstream two years ago, the company’s VP of marketing, Peter Evans, says the latest update may finally make the company competitive in CDN. “Now we have a product that we’re comfortable standing behind,” Evans said. “Do I think we’re going to go head to head with Akamai or Limelight? No. But I do think we can compete with them in an RFP, and I think we can go up against Nos. 3 through 50 in the CDN market.”

Ankeena Introduces Media Flow Director 2

Ankeena Networks introduced the latest version of its media delivery system today, with support for multiple screens, devices and delivery platforms. Media Flow Director 2 is designed to allow service providers to improve the quality of service for IP video that’s being distributed over their networks, just as such service providers are beginning to deploy TV Everywhere capabilities. With support for live and on-demand distribution of Flash, Silverlight, iPhone and video formats, Ankeena says that it can drastically increase the server capacity, meaning that customers need less infrastructure to deploy the same amount of video. Ankeena recently announced a strategic partnership with and investment from Juniper Networks, which will serve as a channel for selling into the large service provider market.

HD Cloud Supports Adobe FMS 3.5

Cloud encoding vendor HD Cloud announced today that it supports multibitrate streaming through Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5. With the latest release, HD Cloud says that it will automatically convert to all formats necessary to take advantage of multibitrate streaming, which requires multiple renditions of each file to enable seamless switching between bitrate files under changing network conditions.

Kontiki Intros Enterprise Video Portal

Enterprise video firm Kontiki released its new VideoCenter enterprise employee video portal. Calling it a “YouTube for the Enterprise,” Kontiki’s video platform is designed for social and community features that employees can use to share ideas, while still being protected with enterprise-level security and controls.

NewTeeVee at SMW

And check out NewTeeVee co-editor Chris Albrecht today as he grills representatives from Motorola, Move Networks, HBO Broadband and Boxee about the threat that broadband video poses to traditional cable providers. The panel he’s moderating, entitled “Bridging TV and Broadband and Cutting the Cable,” starts at 4 p.m. PST.